“Cody must have stolen this before Charles died,” Alyce said. “He clearly tried to access it, probably trying to find out who the moon and station were willed to. There are tool marks on the casing where he attempted to force the biometric lock.” Sheturned it over, showing the scratches. “He failed. Gen-three d-pads have military-grade encryption on their biometric systems. You can’t brute-force them, and you can’t bypass them without destroying the data inside.”
“So it’s still locked,” Holly said.
“It’s still locked.” Luv’s blue scanners passed over the women in the living room. “That device belonged to Charles Moone. I recognize it and my scans confirm it.”
Alyce looked at Mirth. “Biometric locks on gen-three pads can be keyed to more than one user. Given that the will left everything to you, Mirth, and that Charles clearly intended foryouto be the one to take ownership of the station…” She held the d-pad out toward Holly’s mother. “I believe you were meant to open this.”
Mirth looked at the device in Alyce’s hand as if the rectangle of plastoid was dripping with acid. She didn’t reach for it immediately.
“Mom,” Holly said quietly. “You don’t have to.”
Her mother’s lips pressed together. Then she straightened as if she’d made a decision and was not interested in revisiting it. She took the d-pad from Alyce and held it in both hands.
“Well,” Mirth said. “Let’s see what you had to say for yourself, Charles.”
She pressed her thumb to the biometric pad.
The screen lit up.
Holly leaned closer. The interface was simple, organized with efficiency. Charles Moone was clearly a man who did not accumulate digital clutter. There were no applications open, no saved entertainment, no personal files beyond one folder, centered on the home screen.
It was labeled with a single word:Letters.
Mirth tapped it.
The folder contained hundreds of files. Each one was dated, spanning years. Decades. The earliest was dated sixty-seven years ago. The most recent was from the year Charles died.
Mirth opened the first one.
It was addressed to her mother. To Charles’ wife, who had left him and taken their daughter and never come back. Holly watched her mother’s face as she read, and she saw the moment the words landed, because Mirth’s hand came up and pressed against her mouth.
“What does it say?” Andrew asked, leaning forward.
Mirth’s eyes moved across the screen. When she spoke, her voice was unsteady. “He’s apologizing. To my mother. For being…difficult. Distant. He says he doesn’t know how to be what she needs. That he tried, and failed, and that the failure eats him alive.” She scrolled further. “He says he loved her. That he loved her the whole time, and he knew she didn’t believe it, and he couldn’t blame her.”
Holly’s chest tightened.
Mirth opened the next letter. And the next, skipping over dozens at a time to get a sense of Charles’ mental state. They moved through the years in a slow, painful arc. Letters to his wife that were never sent. Letters to Mirth, written when she was a child, then a teenager, then a grown woman. Letters that tracked a man’s awareness of his own decline, his growing isolation, his inability to bridge the distance he had created.
I received your message about your wedding, one read.I wanted to respond. I wrote seven replies and deleted them all. None of them said what I meant. What I meant was: I hope he makes you happier than I made your mother. I hope you have a life full of warmth. I hope you never end up alone on a rock in space, talking to silence because you’ve forgotten how to talk to people.
Mirth’s hand trembled on the screen.
There were letters to Holly, too. Short ones, written when she was born, when she started school, when Mirth must have mentioned Holly’s interest in engineering in one of the messages Charles never replied to.Your mother tells me you like to build things, one said.Your great-grandfather liked to build things, too. He built a whole space station. I wish I could show it to you, but I’ve made that impossible, haven’t I?
Holly looked away. Her father’s hand found her mother’s shoulder and squeezed.
The later letters were harder to read. The words didn’t always make sense, indicating his mind was bending under the weight of solitude and regret. Paranoia crept in. References to people watching him, to ships circling the station, to systems that were failing because someonewantedthem to fail. Some of it, Holly realized with a cold shock, may have been accurate, in his final months. If Complete Respite had been watching the station, Charles might have sensed it without being able to prove it, and the inability to prove it had fed his unraveling.
His view of the station became increasingly detached from reality. He wrote about Moone’s Landing as if it were thriving, as if guests were pouring in and the gardens were lush and the fountain was working, even as the records showed the opposite. He had retreated so far into his own mind that the station he described existed only there.
But threaded through all of it, even the most confused and paranoid passages, was one constant: the station must stay in the family.
I know what I’ve done, read one of the final letters addressed to Mirth.I know you won’t come. I know I’ve made it impossible for you to want to. But this place is Oliver’s legacy, and Oliver’s legacy is the only thing I’ve ever been trusted with that mattered. I can’t let it go to strangers without a fight. So I’ve made arrangements. You’ll think they’re cruel. Maybe they are.But if there’s even a chance that you’ll come here and see what your grandfather built, and decide the family legacy is worth continuing, then the cruelty will have been worth it.
Mirth closed the file and set the d-pad on her lap.
The room was very quiet.
